Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Lightstreamer 5.0 Preview Release Available

We are very excited to announce that an early-availability release of next generation Lightstreamer is now publicly available for download: Lightstreamer 5.0, codename Colosseo.

Lightstreamer includes now full support for WebSockets, the new Web standard from IETF that enables bi-directional, full-duplex communication over the Web. Even if WebSockets are not yet universally supported by browsers and network infrastructure, Lightstreamer is able to automatically choose the best transport, among the many available, based on the characteristics of each client. The Stream-Sense algorithm of Lightstreamer will make sure that the real-time data will travel to and from any possible client, connected through any existing proxies and firewalls. For a historical perspective on Lightstreamer and WebSockets, see this previous article.

Lightstreamer Server 5.0 has increased performance, scalability, and security, in addition to a simpler installation procedure under both Linux and Windows.

JavaScript Client API

On the client side, a brand new, completely redesigned, JavaScript API is available. The new library interface is much easier to use and to integrate and is the first step toward the Lightstreamer Unified Client API. It means that the other client technologies will follow the same interface in the future, so that switching languages and platforms (e.g. from JavaScript to Objective-C, or from Java to .NET) will be as easy as pie! The new JavaScript API, version 6, uses AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) to offer full modularization of the library. This implies that it is now possible to include only the objects that are actually used by your application, rather than having to include the full library. For this purpose, a generator tool is available for on-the-fly creation of custom versions of the JS library. The resulting lib is a single file and you don’t need to include anymore a set of different JS and HTML resources (as in previous versions of Lightstreamer).

There is now full support for cross-origin connections, so that in most cases you don’t have to use the same domain name for the web server and the Lightstreamer server.

The new JS library has now full support for out-of-browser applications, resulting in the possibility of leveraging Lightstreamer inside new JavaScript-based platforms, such as Node.js and PhoneGap. For example, you can now use the Lightstreamer JS API inside your Node.js application to get real-time data from Lightstreamer Server with few lines of code. A source-code example is included in the distribution.

The new Stream-Sense algorithm, besides supporting WebSockets (in addition to previous transports), is much faster, with impressive performance boost on session start up.

Many other features are available as part of the new JS client library, including a new logging and error management facility as well as new ready-made widgets (a new status indicator and new data grids).

Read through the detailed changelog to learn about all the changes to Lightstreamer Server and to the Client and Adapter APIs.

How to check out Lightstreamer 5.0 Colosseo

You can peek inside the distribution even before downloading. After downloading, go through the GETTING_STARTED.TXT instructions to set up the server. You can use any Lightstreamer Evaluation license to run Lightstreamer 5.0, Allegro/Presto/Vivace editions. To run Lightstreamer 5.0, Moderato edition, you need to get a new license key online.

Please send your feedback on Lightstreamer 5.0 Colosseo to support@lightstreamer.com, to help us speed up the beta testing phase. That's very precious to us. We will be doing frequent updates on the Download page, so keep an eye on it for new releases or stay tuned on our Twitter channel.